Artificial Intelligence and the Future Of Health Care

It’s alright if you think that the AI will soon replace replace human physicians. After all, there are various headlines out there that tell us so, such as “Your Future Doctor May Not Be Human”. With the rapid advancement of technology, this scenario might really be possible in the future. However, experts say otherwise: they state that “the reality is more of a collaboration than an ousting”. Patients could soon find their lives in the hands of both the AI and the human physician.

There is no shortage of optimism about AI in the medical community. But many also caution the hype surrounding AI has yet to be realized in real clinical settings. There are also different visions for how AI services could make the biggest impact. And it’s still unclear whether AI will improve the lives of patients or just the bottom line for Silicon Valley companies, health care organizations, and insurers.

“I think that all our patients should actually want AI technologies to be brought to bear on weaknesses in the health care system, but we need to do it in a non-Silicon Valley hype way,” says Isaac Kohane, a biomedical informatics researcher at Harvard Medical School.

If AI works as promised, it could democratize health care by boosting access for underserved communities and lowering costs — a boon in the United States, which ranks poorly on many health measures despite an average annual health care cost of $10,739 per person. AI systems could free overworked doctors and reduce the risk of medical errors that may kill tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of U.S. patients each year. And in many countries with national physician shortages, such as China where overcrowded urban hospitals’ outpatient departments may see up to 10,000 people per day, such technologies don’t need perfect accuracy to prove helpful.

Critics, however, say that all that promise could vanish if the rush to implement AI will trample on patient privacy rights, if it would overlook biases and limitations, or worse, if it fails to deploy services in a way that improves people's health.

“In the same way that technologies can close disparities, they can exacerbate disparities,” says Jayanth Komarneni, founder and chair of the Human Diagnosis Project (Human Dx), a public benefit corporation focused on crowdsourcing medical expertise. “And nothing has that ability to exacerbate disparities like AI.”

More details of this topic over at Undark.

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